Is Travis to you the equivilent of Jax to Gooseworx?
This is an interesting question! I had to ask somebody what Gooseworx thought of Jax because while I have seen TADC, that’s as far as my interaction with that media has gone haha. The gist I got is that Jax is Gooseworx’s favorite and a self-insert essentially? Let me know if that isn’t what you meant and I can readjust my answer bUT:
Is he my favorite? Currently, yes. I’m in the creation phase with him somewhat still, which is where I sat with Vox and Alastor for a long time until I got them down real good.
Will he remain my favorite forever? I’m not sure—maybe, maybe not. Only time will tell; my whimsy cannot be contained.
Is he a self-insert? No. At least, not in the sense that people often mean? I put a part of myself in every character, but of all the characters I’ve written, the one I’m probably most like at my core is Alastor.
For Travis specifically: I gave him my aesthetic, my sense of taste, and the particular need to control how others perceive him. His self-styling and presentation is deliberate and cohesive because he likes having control of people’s reactions and perceptions, which is also something I share, probably from some childhood trauma or something, idk where the need to control how people perceive me comes from really.
But Travis isn’t the only character with that trait, it’s just his is concentrated in style and polish and a careful curation of his public persona. His main flaws aren’t mine; I feel about them like how Alastor does, very much, “Please cut it out, cease this behavior this instant, this is very annoying, go to therapy,” kind of vibe.
I construct characters backwards, somewhat. They usually start with one action, and then their personality arises from a chain of questions asking: “What sort of person would do this action?”
If I start with traits it’s 1 or 2 superficial things, but my conception for Travis initially was entirely different from what he is now.
His current personality was born out of the question, “What sort of person would sacrifice their identity and their life, subordinating their moral values and who they are, in service of somebody?” because it had to be believable that Travis would do that, or else the conceit of how does Vox get away with being such a messy freak falls apart.
So the answer was to make Travis be in love with Vox, because love has the potential to make people fucking insane, but the specific sort of toxic love that causes codependency to that level doesn’t arise from a stable sense of self, and Travis would have had to meet Vox early enough for that codependency to develop into what it is, because that shit doesn’t happen overnight.
The person has to be fully and entirely willing to give up the entirety of who they are in service of the other person, and that is what Travis is/was, and that sort of thing comes from identity formation. Vox was the first person to see Travis, the person who named Travis, Travis’s first love, Travis’s first instance of self-sacrifice (because he was a traumatized child doing the best he had with what he had, which wasn’t much).
All of that came from the question, who the hell would do this crazy shit for Vox without tiring, and that’s the question I ask of all my characters when I build them.
For Vox, it was, what sort of person becomes this charismatic, intelligent, chaotic serial killer? What about him has to break in formation that this is who he becomes? And then, generating outward, what sort of flavor of action does that produce specifically. His motivations for killing are entirely different from Alastor’s; Alastor always had an end point he was working toward. Vox didn’t.
For Alastor it’s, what creates this single-minded focus and obsessive circling, the murder-in-service-to-justice (or how he perceives it), and what must break in formation that that’s who somebody becomes, and additionally with Alastor I made some specific political choices as to how I wanted to portray his family and father, and then I had to work that into who he was.
Like how did somebody who had a pretty decent childhood, parents-wise, become as twisted as Alastor did?
So that’s how I add in backstory for everyone and how I create them. It’s an excavation, backwards-looking, about how we got to the moment I’m writing, and then from that point forward, all the actions that character takes have to cohere psychologically with that profile.
If I need the character to do something that they currently wouldn’t because of the backstory I’ve created, the events currently in play, then I either adjust who does that thing, OR I think—what sort of thing would have had to have happened that somebody would do this specific action?
And whatever that thing is, if it fits, and if the combo of that + the other existing psychological architecture of the character coheres, then I give them that backstory event, and write forward.
Everyone gets written like that. And like, in doing that, I look to experiences I’ve gone through, or analog experiences, or those of friends/family, or sometimes I will go searching for psychology, and sprinkle those in, because then I have somewhere to write from.
The idea of never really being seen for who you are on the inside, the delineation between inner self and perception of that inner self, is something everyone in life has to contend with. Some people are closer to the surface, their inner self closer to how people perceive them, but most people have depth to them that they don’t exactly know how to surface, or don’t want to surface, that makes them feel a little bit outside the circle.
Well. Maybe neurotypical people aren’t like that, I’ve got no idea. Regardless, that rupture between inner self and outward perception is where a lot of the personality and life in the characters lives. Humans are complex, multifaceted beings whose contradictions are surface level. If you look beneath the hood, the wiring makes sense, so that's how I build characters.
